


Ursa

by jazzjo



Series: Someone to Watch Over Me [1]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-30 00:48:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5144180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzjo/pseuds/jazzjo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Since the very beginning, the day she had been pulled out of the pod and dropped off at the Danvers', Alex had been there. Not a day went by without Kara more than aware that her big sister was always looking out for her. </p><p>Somehow, some way, that made all the difference.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ursa

The first night Kara had spent in the Danvers home, she had huddled to the bottom of her single bed, blankets pulled around her as tightly as they would go. 

 

Somehow, strangely, she longed for the minuscule confines of the pod she had travelled in for twenty four years. She had hated the pod for the longest time. Time may not physically have passed in the Phantom Zone, but she felt every long, drawn-out moment of the time she spent stuck in that pod. 

 

She felt exposed, all too open to any and all dangers of the world – this _new_ world. 

 

Pulling the covers more firmly around herself, Kara tried to stifle the sobs as she screwed the eyes tightly shut. Shaking fingers grasped emphatically at the pendant around her neck. 

 

Sure, she had punched the window of her pod more than once in frustration, but she hadn’t cried since she left Krypton. Tears were for children, and she was far from a child.

 

But in reality, she wasn’t. That was the fact of the matter.

 

By now she was meant to have become a fully grown woman, Kal-El in her care. Instead she lay on a bed in a house in National City, her knees pulled up to her still-flat prepubescent chest. 

 

She had lived out those years she spent adrift in the Phantom Zone. She had spent every nonexistent minute and second waiting and waiting for something, _anything_ , to change. 

 

Sure, she had spent more than her fair share of time trying to allow sleep to tide her over the wait, but she had gone through that time there, suspended in half-consciousness, never ageing a day. 

 

Kara Zor-El had witnessed her home planet burst into flames, the furore of which she would never forget. It was almost as if she could hear the screams of her people in her pod, no matter how far away they were from her. 

 

She had watched the immolation of Krypton, with the painful, acute awareness that her parents were on that planet, burning with it. 

 

At the end of all things, she had failed them. She had failed her mother. She had failed Kal-El. 

 

And now she was alone. 

 

She pressed her back into the footboard of the bedframe, closing her eyes as tight as she could, trying to remember what it felt like to fall asleep in that drifting pod. Sleep would not come. 

 

For the first time in however long she had been set adrift, she could not replay the image of her mother and father bidding her their goodbyes. 

 

She could not recall nights spent with her aunt under the Kryptonian night sky, a picture book of Kryptonian legends between them and myths of the skies and its burning lights on their lips. She could not remember what it was like to be held by her father and spun around, nor the nights she spent awake hours past her bedtime, awaiting her mother’s return from another sentencing. 

 

She could not even remember the sound of her voice, singing her to sleep. 

 

Sobs began to escape her lips despite her valiant attempts to keep them trapped in by biting her bottom lip. Her fists tightened their grip around the covers around her, seams popping and ripping from the strain she subjected them to as she pulled the covers over her head. 

 

Even in a minuscule pod, just large enough for her legs to stretch out fully, she had never felt this alone. 

 

“Kara?” A soft voice broke through her silent tears, “I’m going to move the blankets a little, okay?”

 

A hand too small to be either of the elder Danvers shifted the blankets away from her head. 

 

_Alex_. 

 

The girl was older than her by barely two years, taller and shrouded in a sort of calm that Kara could not for the life of her figure out how to emulate. 

 

Alex had welcomed her cordially when she arrived, and Kara had seen her peek through the curtains from inside the house when Kal-El had first entrusted the Danvers with her care. Even so, the word “warm” was definitely not the first word that came to mind when describing her new sister. 

 

And yet there she was, setting herself down on Kara’s bed and shifting the younger girl so that they were lying shoulder to shoulder, legs hanging off the footboard of the bed. 

 

“You’re going to like it here,” Alex whispered conspiratorially, “Mom and Dad are super cool scientists and they let us do all sorts of cool stuff.”

 

Kara was still attempting to cease her sobbing, but found a small grin blossoming on her face in place of the pained grimace that had been there just seconds before. 

 

“I can name most of the constellations we can see from the backyard,” Alex began once more, “I could teach you if you’d like.”

 

Nodding her head slightly, Kara turned to glance at her older sister.

 

Alex swung her legs off the footboard, leaping off the bed and offering Kara her hand. As Kara slipped her hand into her sister’s Alex pulled her out of her door and into her own room, grabbing the blanket that lay at the foot of her bed. 

 

They lay out the blanket on the slightly dewy grass in the backyard, and Kara followed suit as Alex flopped down on it, lifting her gaze up to the stars above them. 

 

“There’s Ursa Major, see, the Great Bear,” Alex guided her hand until Kara nodded against her shoulder, “It’s the third largest constellation, and contains the Big Dipper.”

 

They shifted their line of sight as Alex continued again, “And then there’s Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, which has the Little Dipper in it. It’s kinda like us, then, big bear and little bear.”

 

Alex must have explained at least twenty constellations that night, ranging from the story of Orion and the Scorpion (of which they only saw Orion, of course), to the myths surrounding Hercules and the like. 

 

At one point, Kara began to explain the differences between stars in the sky, detailing the reasons why she and Kal-El had powers on Earth. 

 

She described the flaming scarlets of a red star sunrise and two moons in the night sky as Alex marvelled over the revelation of a world so different than their own. 

 

She began to speak of the starlight that fell on Krypton, the stories behind the groupings that her people had made sense of. The stars they were given, but the constellations they made. 

 

“Kal-El doesn’t remember much,” Kara murmured, “Sometimes I wish I didn’t as well. But it’s nice, I suppose, having memories of where I came from. I won’t spent my whole life wondering what it would have been like, I suppose.”

 

Alex grinned, nudging Kara’s head with her own, “You can tell me all about Krypton, and I’ll tell you all about Earth. You’ll never forget where you came from, this way.”

 

Eventually, Kara had fallen asleep against her older sister’s shoulder, and Alex had followed soon after. 

 

The Danvers found them in the morning lain out on the grass, Kara’s face hidden in the crook of Alex’s neck as Alex’s left arm curled protectively around the small twelve year old frame of her little sister. 

 


End file.
